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courtroom scene; and from the late 1950s on, younger students were expelled by Nathaniel “and just shattered,” said Barbara, who recalled her husband’s most bruising interrogations as “savagery.” Peikoff was a particular target, since the sweet-natured but nerdish philosophy major sometimes fell under the influence of “non-objective” philosophers, such as John Dewey and Bertrand Russell, or innocently befriended academic scoffers at Rand’s ideas. As a result, he was often chastised by both Rand and Branden, and was once harshly rebuked and banished for two years—to teach at the University of Denver. But he always returned to Rand’s side. He and others who remained learned to trade occasional humiliation for intimate exposure to Rand’s penetrating thought and personal insights. “When she laid out her argument [against you],” said Barbara, “people thought that she was right. When she laid out your flaws, what she said made sense.” Her magnetism drew and held them. As Kent recalled, “The six months I had spent [in the group] were like a new world. All my life, I’d wanted to know people who talked about ideas. I’d wanted to find a point of view that made real sense to me. Most of all, I’d wanted to believe that man is good. She was the first person I had ever heard say that man is good and can be good, that there is a way to achieve what you want to achieve, and that you should aim high and have a right to aim high.” Rand’s soaring testimonials to individual accomplishment and her consummate ability to make sense of the world were qualities her followers deeply prized. The young actress stayed close to Rand for another fifteen years, then walked away after a final, pitiless deflation of her hopes.

On one Saturday night during this period, Ayn and Nathaniel ducked into the kitchen to fetch coffee and sweets for the group gathered in the living room. Excitement about Rand’s progress on Galt’s speech was running high. In answer to a question about why so many critics attacked her celebration of individualism and strict justice as cold or cruel, she explained that people often think “pro-reason” means “anti-emotion.” The truth, she said, is just the opposite. Among rational men and women, emotion and reason go hand in hand. “If a person tells you that he regards reason and emotion as antagonists, he is telling you that his emotions are irrational and that he wants to get away with something dishonest,” she told them. As she and Branden prepared the snacks, they were both in a heady mood. So when she whispered, “Darling, there’s something I think I was wrong about,” he answered playfully, “Impossible. What could that be?” Why, the limited duration of their affair, she answered, beaming, and added, “Can you think of any good reason why we can’t go on like this forever?” With his own emotions sounding an inner siren, and a sudden feeling that a gun was pointed at his head, he had no doubt that it was he who “pulled the trigger,” he later wrote. “No. I can’t,” he answered, irrationally, confusedly, and fatefully.

Rand completed Galt’s speech on October 13, 1955. She took three weeks off, and then plunged directly into drafting the last three chapters of the book. Here the novel picks up pace. Wesley Mouch, a wily government bureaucrat, and his placid boss, Mr. Thompson, the American “Head of State,” kidnap John Galt and torture him in an effort to force him to save the nation from economic ruin. Galt not only refuses to become the despot they want him to be, he helps his incompetent kidnappers to repair a broken-down electrical shock machine to which they have strapped him, all the while mocking their primitive notions, as Cyrus and Roark had laughed before him. Dagny, along with Rearden, Francisco, and an anti-Robin Hood pirate (and former college classmate of Francisco’s and Galt’s) named Ragnar Danneskjöld, rescue him, but not before the railroad heiress shoots and kills a burly government guard who bars their way, thus demonstrating the legitimacy of using force against those who use force first. (Dagny’s predecessor was Rand